As I looked over my site archive today, I realized that I haven’t yet told you about Ligia‘s latest show, which is called “De Vorba cu Ligia“. Translated from Romanian, it means “Talking with Ligia”. It’s a simple name and a lovely show where she interviews various interesting people doing good things in Romania. It’s a show where we also talk about raw food, which is what we did in the fourth, most recent episode. We publish each episode to Ligia’s YouTube Channel in full 1080p HD. We started filming it in December of last year, when Ligia was about six months pregnant with Sophie, and we filmed the last episode this last weekend, when Sophie was 2½ months old.

I’ve posted the first four shows here for you. They’re in Romanian, but I know that at least a few of you subscribed readers know the language, so you’re fine. As for the rest of you, the last two episodes will be of interest, because we’ll show you stuff, not just talk about it, and that’s easily understood in any language. Besides, you’ll get to see our little Sophie in the last one, and babies are adorable in any language!

Episode 1 (12/20/12):

Episode 2 (2/5/13):

Episode 3 (2/14/13):

Episode 4 (5/22/13):

Enjoy!

The basic coffee-making equation doesn’t change: use your favorite coffee, use as much or as little of it as you prefer — but instead of putting it in the coffee machine, put it in a glass pitcher and add cold, filtered water. Then, cover the pitcher to stop insects or dust from getting into it and set it on the window sill or somewhere outside, in direct sunlight.

Monitor it periodically. Once it gets hot to the touch, the coffee’s done. You can leave it out a little longer if you want a stronger coffee, or leave it less if you don’t. I live in a temperate climate and in moderately warm spring weather (18-25° Celsius), my coffee was ready in 1½ – 2 hours. If you live in a warm climate, it should be ready even faster, maybe even in 30 minutes or so.

The taste of sun-brewed coffee is unique: it’s mild with no bitter aftertaste and there’s a distinct caramel flavor to it.

A few pieces of advice:

• Use alkaline water, it will make it taste even better
• Use a French Press, it’ll make it much easier to pour the coffee out of the pitcher once it’s ready
• Use regular filter-ground coffee even though you’re using a French Press… it doesn’t make sense at first, but know that the water temperature in the sun will only be about 40-50° Celsius as compared to 90-100° Celsius with boiling water. This means you’ll need a finer grind in order to get more flavor out of the coffee. 

Enjoy!

Our apricot tree is in full bloom. The sweet cherry tree is also starting to blossom. No sign yet on the sour cherry trees. And of course the spring flowers are out, as you’ll see in the photos from our garden.

Enjoy!

In this video, which is part of The Elegant Gentleman series, I talk about the following topics:

1. The importance of a proper fit (also known as a cut) for your clothes, which only a good tailor can do. It matters because it not only makes you look good, but it allows for fluctuations in body weight and/or mass. A great suit will hide these changes in your body to a certain point, beyond which it will either start to show them or you’ll start feeling uncomfortable in the clothes, signaling that alterations or a new suit are in order. A poorly cut suit will generally not accommodate fluctuations in body weight, showing them right away, in unflattering ways. This ties into my second point, which is…
2. The differences between bespoke (custom-made) suits and store-bought suits, one of those differences being a proper fit (discussed above). Bespoke suits fit better, naturally, since they’re made for your body from the start. Store-bought suits will feel like they’re off-the-rack 95% of the time and in my case, 100% of the time. Because my body is of an athletic build, whenever I go to the store to try on a suit, either the coat or the pants won’t fit me and in either case, any alterations that would have to be made are so significant that the suit would no longer look good.
3. The importance of finding good materials cannot be overstated, since they are the stuff from which suits are made. They cannot be an afterthought. I suggest you go to fabric warehouses in your area (it may take some effort to find them) and pick out materials that you like. Educate yourself on the fibers used in the materials, then on the texture, the colors, the patterns and then you’ll be properly equipped to shop for fabrics. (Or you can find an honest and knowledgeable salesman who’s willing to explain that to you.)
4. The price of a good suit isn’t set in stone and will vary widely, first based on where you live (larger, more famous cities bring up the price) and second based on what your tailor decides to charge. For example, where I live, in a small town in Southern Transilvania, I can get a good bespoke three-piece suit for about $175 – 250, and that includes the price of the fabrics, buttons and zippers, too. I hear that prices back in the US are somewhere in the area of $750 – 1,500 and there again they’ll vary based on the city and tailor shop.
5. The one important characteristic that will make a suit much more expensive and rightfully so is whether it is sewn or glued together. You probably cringe when you hear “glued together” but it isn’t as bad as all that. This is also referred to as canvassed vs. fused. Suits have been glued together for decades. Basically, the outer and middle layers of the suit are pressed together with a hot iron and a special coating on the middle layer makes it stick to the outer layer. The lining is usually canvassed (or floating) on all suits. This allows the tailor to shape the suit much easier once it’s been cut, rather than sew it all together to give it its shape, which is laborious, requiring much more skill and time and therefore rendering the suit more expensive. There are actually three levels of quality: there is a fully floating canvassed jacket, a half canvassed jacket (where only the lapels and upper construction around the chest is fused) and a fully fused jacket. My suits are half canvassed, simply because my tailor doesn’t know and isn’t interested in working on fully floating canvassed jackets.

I hope this proves helpful to you! Enjoy!

Be sure to go through all the photos below. I picked them out of hundreds taken at the event. Enjoy!

1. I began weight training in 1994-95 and am still passionate about it, many years later. My interest in weight training and bodybuilding pre-dates this website by about seven years. 
2. I am a raw foodist and I want to prove that you can build serious muscle on raw food. For me, raw food means a mix of 20-40% cooked vegan food, with the rest made up of raw vegan food and superfoods. My protein supplementation is about 75% raw vegan and 25% vegan.
3. I’ll turn 37 this year and I want to prove that one can build muscle at this age and even beyond it.

Last autumn, I started going to the gym regularly once more, with the specific purpose of building muscle. All summer long, I’d been exercising at home, using Arnold’s 1% Workout, getting my body ready for weights. And that’s one thing I’d like to stress right now: if you’ve been off weights for a while, years maybe, like me, you’ll need to get ready for weightlifting with a few months of bodyweight exercises. Don’t just go to the gym and start lifting, you’re asking for unnecessary inflammation, pain and potential injuries.

From September to the end of October, I made great progress. My muscles started remembering their previous size and began to grow again. I was on my way to wonderful results, sooner than expected, until an unexpected injury sidelined me, right at the start of November. This was completely unrelated to bodybuilding. We were doing renovations at home, and the workmen had dug a trench in the garden to lay some new pipes. They forgot to tell me. We came back home at night from an out-of-town trip, I took a walk through the garden in pitch black darkness and fell right in. It was a strange feeling, stepping into a void… When my foot hit bottom, I heard a terrible crunch and then the excruciating pain began… The force of the impact pulled on my ankle ligaments so much that it fractured both the tibula and the fibula at their ends. (The medical term is bimalleolar fracture.) It snapped one of them clean off and the other managed to hang on.  Let’s just say I have a nice zipper-shaped scar on my ankle and a couple of extra titanium screws in there. I’m thankful that the ligaments didn’t tear, because the recovery would have been more painful and would have lasted longer. Here’s the x-ray after surgery.

I was told to take it easy after the surgery, so two months of what would have been fruitful weight training went down the drain. I finally couldn’t take it any longer after the holidays and went back to the gym on crutches, hopping around on one leg from machine to machine, training what I could train without affecting my ankle.

Things got better soon after that. I also went to physical therapy, did acupuncture and my ankle is almost fully healed now. There’s still some soreness in the mornings, some swelling still has to disappear but I can use it: I can do standing and sitting calf raises, I can walk normally and will soon be able to run and jump as well.

It’s now March and I wanted to show you the progress I’ve made since the start of December. I do wish I’d have taken a photo of my body earlier, at the start of my weight training, but I didn’t. The best I can do is this photo, taken in September on a trip to Lake Vidraru. You can clearly see that I have little muscle mass and my arms are pretty thin.

Now let me show you a much better example of my progress.

Here you can clearly see that my arms are much thicker and my back is thicker, justifying the ~10 lbs. of weight I put on. And I can assure you that it’s all muscle; if anything, my body fat is lower now.

This is only the beginning. I plan to add muscle mass until I get to 200 lbs. It’s not so far-fetched as you might think. In college, I went from a skinny ectomorph of 135 lbs. in my freshman year to a muscular mesomorph of 195 lbs. in my senior year. Granted, I did it on a traditional diet of meat, dairy, eggs and vegetables, but I know it’s also doable on raw foods. If I got to 195 lbs. once I can do it again and I can go beyond it as well. I can do it on raw foods and more importantly, I can do it without steroids or other illegal substances. My body is perfectly capable of secreting all of the hormones it needs, as it did so in the past and will continue to do so in the future.

Wondering what my diet looks like? Here’s a peek.

I may also do a workout video (or videos) in the future.

The best part is that Ligia and I both wanted a daughter. To make it even more interesting, we kept the gender a secret from ourselves till the very climactic end, when the midwife set the freshly born Sophie on Ligia’s chest and we learned that our wish had been granted.

Given that I’ve started bodybuilding once more in recent months, it’s only fitting I write about it again, this time to share my Wonder Smoothie recipe. It’s what I use to recover from my workouts and build muscle. The best part of this smoothie is that it uses raw food ingredients, so anyone can drink it, whether they’re raw foodists like me, or vegans, vegetarians and meat eaters.

That’s right, you may not think raw food and bodybuilding go together but they do. Since I’ve started bodybuilding again, I’ve been amazed with my progress and ability to put on lean muscle in just a few months, while on a 60-80% raw food diet (and some cooked vegan food). I’m going to share my special list of superfoods and ingredients with you below, and I hope my Wonder Smoothie will benefit you as much as it has benefitted me.

Muscle Building and Workout Recovery Smoothie:

• Chlorella: 1 tsp
• Spirulina: 1 tsp
• Mesquite: 1 tsp
• Gynostemma: 1/2 tsp
• Baobab: 1/2 tsp
• Suma Root: 1/2 tsp
• Triphala: 1/2 tsp
• Rose Hip: 1/2 tsp
• Methylsulfonylmethane: 1/2 tsp
• Coconut Butter: 1 tsp
• Hemp Seeds: 1-2 tbsp
• Sesame Seeds: 2-3 tbsp
• Alkaline Water: as needed
• Raw Honey: as needed
• Raw Protein: 11/2-2 scoops

The instructions are simple: blend the sesame and hemp seeds with water and honey first to get the raw milk. Then add in the rest of the ingredients and blend the whole thing again to a typical smoothie texture.

And here’s what I look like these days…

Enjoy and get big!

Warm weather may be on the way but now is the time to pick the fabrics out of which you’d like to make your next cold season’s clothes. Chances are it’ll be discounted because they’re making way for the thinner fabrics of summer and besides, you want to take your time and really look around. You should look for the best quality cloth at the best price for your budget. You should only buy fabrics that you’d love to wear. There’s no reason to invest in fabric that you’re not sure about, only to invest even more money and effort afterward in order to make it into a suit and then, as you stand in front of the mirror, come to the realization that you don’t really like it.

Buy only what you fall in love with, find a great tailor, make it into a suit that you’ll love, and that way you’ll ensure that you’ve got an outfit you can wear for years to come, one that will make you feel good every time you put it on.

All of my cold weather outfits feature thick wool fabrics, just like these. I love to look for interesting colors and textures. Underneath, I love to wear thick cotton shirts, sometimes with a white cotton t-shirt underneath the shirt, for extra warmth. And I like to wear a tie, not necessarily to make the outfit more formal, and this is a little secret… I do it because it keeps me warmer. The tie causes the shirt collar to close up tightly around my neck, keeping the warmth generated by my body inside the shirt. And the tie acts as a sort of scarf, wrapped around the base of my neck and draped down my chest. It really works, it keeps me warmer in winter. Try it for yourselves and you’ll see what I mean.